With that number, he’s only behind Lorde and Imagine Dragons who has 12 nominations each. However, Justin can only win up to 10 awards because he has two nominations in the Top R&B Album category (one for each part of 20/20). Unless, of course, we count “Holy Grail” as a Justin nomination and it’s back to 11.

Justin Timberlake will not be playing, announces a man from the lip of the stage, rubbing the back of his own neck ruefully. JT’s been battling laryngitis; doctors have decided he should not perform. But a replacement has been lined up for tonight’s performance – and it’s Tom Jones!

This lamest of April fools tricks no one, least of all those sitting in the swanky VIP Experience lounge bar in the middle of the audience, supping cocktails at little tables. Timberlake is soon with us, in silhouette, as brass fanfares around him; his voice, in perfect condition, jackknifes from yearning falsetto to toned tenor to staccato rapping for more than two hours. The April fool, meanwhile, is one of only three tiny lapses of judgment in an evening of otherwise unrelenting class – pop so good we probably need a new name for the stuff, to distinguish it from the piffle by numbers atop the charts (She Looks So Perfect by Aussie boy band 5 Seconds of Summer, at the time of writing).

It seems unfair to pick any lint at all from a set that takes a decade of top-calibre pop R&B, rewinds it gloriously to the era of rhythm & blues big bands and adds a Tennessee flavour. Rock Your Body is an early audiovisual thrill, sinuous and dazzling. The back wall of the stage is a giant flattened beehive divided up into pulsating white hexagons, serving as a light show or a screen, or the rippling skin on a bass bin. JT’s oldest solo hit Like I Love You is utterly transformed by the surfeit of able musicians. “Drummmms!” Timberlake declares, activating two percussionists like he’s flicking a switch. But it’s precisely because Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience is so spectacularly focused, so gleaming, that the tiny specks stand out.

Timberlake is, instead, a glutton for funk showmanship – an older and much more exacting tradition. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at the tuba player auditions. The brass section and backing vocalists of Timberlake’s 15-strong Tennessee Kids big band can not only dance, they never actually stop jiving or twirling trumpets. There is a spectacular moment at the climax of Holy Grail – Timberlake’s show-stealing guest spot on the last Jay-Z record – where it slips seamlessly into Cry Me a River and then back again. Up front, Timberlake is surrounded by guitarists, strafing the audience top to bottom, all in time, while the entire rest of the band (plus six dancers) are arrayed behind them like a battalion, slapping their arms down, hip-hop style, also in perfect split-second sync.

How has this excellence happened? Timberlake, 33, started out as just more boy band cannon fodder. Since leaving NSync, his solo career has read like a manual on how to transcend expectation. Timberlake’s hit rate in the singles may have declined of late, but his cultural game has stepped up incrementally, with assured film roles (The Social Network, among others), comedy turns (Saturday Night Live doesn’t suffer fools) and a body of work that just seems to keep finding extra folds in the fabric of pop. There are no confetti cannons or fireworks tonight. Very little is gratuitous or pointless. For two hours everything is pretty much justified.

He’s got tour dates all over Europe and North America through the end of the year

Get your suit and tie ready: Justin Timberlake has announced new dates for his 20/20 World Experience tour, which will take him from Europe to the Middle East to North America over the summer and fall.

Timberlake will be in Berlin on April 24, then Paris on the 26th and Stockholm on May 10, Tel Aviv on May 28, and London on June 10th. Then he’ll cross the pond and hit up Charlotte, N.C. on July 12, Boston on the 19th, and New Orleans August 3. Then he’s taking a break for September through October before starting up again in Portland, Ore. on November 20, L.A. on the 24th and then Brooklyn on December 14th.

after a short break, JT and the TN kids are back on stage to kick off the international portion of the 20/20 experience tour.

A band, The Tennessee Kids, rise from underneath the stage. They are a powerhouse, loaded with soaring backing singers, thunderous drums, euphoric brass and screeching funk guitar, they are as pristine as JT’s primed and perfected dance moves and they frequently play at floor-shaking volume.

The surging gusto that erupts from the first set-closer ‘Cry Me a River’ is enthralling.

At 33 JT still looks boyish, with a perfect Disney smile still in tact, but this tour is him smoothing over the teenybopper past and presenting himself as something more fitting for his age: as sleek and stylish, as gentlemanly and venerable.

It is a performance laden with lavishness and sexual teasing (when Timberlake gropes his crotch it sets off a tidal wave of screams). With a steady stream of “f**k’s” throughout the night, he seems to be cultivating an almost ‘loveable rogue’ aura around himself, like a James Bond of pop or a zeitgeist Sinatra.

During the second set the stage rises up and glides across the audience (to much excitement). There are covers of Elvis, Michael Jackson and even Kool & The Gang. T

The penultimate ‘Sexyback’ is a knockout and the closing ‘Mirrors’ even prompts a successful marriage proposal in the audience before Timberlake disappears into darkness once again, leaving behind a mammoth two hour-plus voyage of pop.

If you thought Dawson Leary was the most “uncool” guy of all time, well, you were wrong.

James Van Der Beek stopped by HuffPost Live on Wednesday, March 26, and revealed that, back in the day, he tried to sneak Justin Timberlake and some of the other underage members of *NSYNC into a club in Las Vegas.

Yup, THAT Justin Timberlake. And yup, THAT James Van Der Beek.

“I was in Vegas one New Year’s and somebody came by and said, ‘*NSYNC wants to meet you!’ And at the time, *NSYNC was the second to Backstreet Boys, it was before they had blown up. They had just come out with some Christmas album, like at the same time 98 Degrees did,” Van Der Beek laughed, referencing the boy band’s 1998 holiday album “Home for Christmas.”

“So, I said, ‘OK.’ And I met them and they were so sweet, they were so nice. They were such cool kids and I immediately liked them,” he added. “I remember that night, we were all going to some club and they were all too young. And so I went in and somehow passed my I.D. back so that Justin could get in with my I.D. And then Justin got in and then tried to pass it off to Lance [Bass] to get in. By the third time [the bouncers] saw a James Van Der Beek I.D., they were like, ‘Ah, I don’t think so James.'” Poor Lance!

We’re assuming J.C. Chasez attempted to use Joshua Jackson’s I.D.? Just a thought.

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